Golf Psychiatrist: Keep Your Eye on the Ball (Unabridged‪)‬

Kenny, the golf psychiatrist, plays virtual golf with his dream team that includes a par shooter, a trusted mentor, a cockeyed optimist, and their not-so-normal psychiatrist.

Kenny opens his stream of consciousness to listeners. His openness reveals a mushroom picking, philosophizing, otherworldly guide. An angel-like alter ego, Mr. Jack, follows the psychiatrist for years and talks to Kenny. With Mr. Jack’s coaching, Kenny learns the importance of training, confidence, friendship, and mental positivity. The foursome treats their quirky psychiatrist with sarcasm, compassion, and genuine friendship. A word of caution from Kenny’s friends, “Ken is a real nut job, as if there is any other kind of psychiatrist. Even so, we let him be our unreliable narrator. We accept Kenny’s inconsistent performance, unreliable narrative, and warped sanity”.

Golf is therapy. The authors could just explain mental golf, but they want the listener to experience golf psychiatry. Each hole represents a layer in the process of building confidence.

After medical school and psychiatric training, Dr. Fuller discovered that emotions dramatically effect golf performance. Psychiatry and golf became linked when the young psychiatrist saw an accomplished golfer choke over a six-foot putt on the last hole of an important golf tournament. The reasons for this “choke” and how to prevent anxiety-induced missed hits intrigued the practicing psychotherapist and fueled his passion for playing golf.

Through the years of playing golf with three friends, Kenny developed an understanding of how the mental aspects of golf affect the level of play and consequently the enjoyment of both recreational and professional golfers.

His ideas resulted in the publication of the book, Goodbye Bogeys, a short, therapeutic book that helps golfers develop a confidence through therapeutic repetition. By linking the mind to the technique of golf the result is a more complete golfer.

When a business friend read Goodbye Bogeys, he suggested that the two collaborate on a novel about of confident, mental golf appeal to golfers and non-golfers but are interested in how to improve confidence in facing all of life’s challenges.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball is the advice given by a mushroom picking, philosophizing, alter ego who guides our golf psychiatrist through a virtual, 18-hole round of golf. Each hole represents a layer in building confident mental golf.

Each hole’s theme is one of the layers that build’s confidence and focus that strengthens and prepares our mind when solving the problems faced during a round of golf and our sometimes stressful and chaotic issues when trying to live a successful life.

The layers that build and use confidence:

Visualizing
Avoiding Trouble
Finding Calmness
Tuning-Out Distractions
Forgetting the Past
Dealing with the Environment
Using Tension Positively
Recovering from Failure
Repeating Success
Feeling is Okay
Performing with Philia
Hoping is not a Strategy
Self-talking
Turning Impossible into Possible
Minding My Moments
Thriving on Chaos
Preparing to Win
Owning your success